"Who is Tony Judt?" a woman wanted to know. We were at a cocktail party at the offices of a left-wing publisher in Dumbo in March, and the name of the controversial British-born European historian and public intellectual was in the air.

A friend of hers who was hovering nearby, a man of British extraction, to judge by his accent, pitched in with the following epithet: "He's an anti-Marxist scumbag."

Not everyone was buying into the aura of sanctity that had attached to Tony Judt ever since amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease, had left him paralyzed from the neck down. And why should they? Judt himself was always bemused and irritated by it.

The disease that had ruined his body with terrifying rapidity, and which finally killed him on Friday, left his mind fully intact. And he used the life and the mind that was left to him to pursue the many polemics that had punctuated his career. He spent his life assailing other people's cherished myths, in essays all the more annihilating for being so urbane. He remained the same proud and indomitable man-such was his tremendous force of will-while strapped into a wheelchair.

"I'm as generous or mean as I ever was, and as intellectually aggressive or pedagogically gentle as I have always been," he told me this spring when I was profiling him for New York.

At other cocktail parties in other precincts of the city, one could easily imagine the question being answered differently: "He's a self-hating Jew." "He's a radical Leftist." "He's a white male elitist." "He's an arrogant blowhard."

But also: "He's the most brilliant political writer of our time." "He's the most rigorous and caring teacher I've ever met." "He's the last great public intellectual of our time."

In my own view, most of the attacks are plainly false; much of the adulation is substantially true. But to me he was, as a personality, a brilliant scholarship boy driven to exceed everyone in the acuity of his thinking, writing and speech.

Mr. Judt was the first member of his family to go to college-neither of his parents continued their schooling beyond the eighth grade. In a single generation, he had ventured from lower-middle-class London (his mother was "a qualified lady's hairdresser in the age of big hair," as he put it; his father a itinerant laborer) for the highest reaches of the Oxbridge mandarinate. The life he narrated to me was a series of renunciations: goodbye to the Marxism of his childhood, the Zionism of his youth and the political (and pseudo-political) passions of the late 1960s, followed by a career that was a long rear-guard action against the academic trends of his day.

He had always been, as he put it to me, "a difficult, disobedient and radical child." At Cambridge, he exchanged the Cockney accent of his youth (which he readily lapses into for comic effect) for the richly cultured idiom he spoke as an adult. He acquired the supreme self-confidence that is inculcated there. It was the renunciation that made him into the remarkable self-made creation he became.

"All scholarship boys, all upwardly educationally mobile people, break, even if they don't want to or don't realize it, with their family, their class, their way of speaking, the world they grew up in," he told me. "That's what upward social mobility is all about. Education is a particularly wrenching version of it. Because you can get rich in business from a working-class background and remain yourself, but with more money. But when you progress through education, you speak differently, you have different references and you live in a different world. I certainly experienced that."

Mr. Judt was a pure meritocrat, without inherited status or fortune to secure his place in the great world. He simply had to be smarter, more erudite and more verbally agile than everyone he confronted, in every setting he entered. And until the very end, he always was-and he knew it. Like many people who have had to earn their power, he was forthright about possessing it.

"I've never thought of myself as a benign despot; but I do crave autonomy and hate being obliged to people I don't respect," he told me when I asked him about the leadership style that had garnered controversy at New York University.

"I'm sure that's true of most of us, but I am lucky: I get to act on my preferences."

His preference was to defend his independence in thought against the blandishments of friends and the aggression of foes alike, and he acted on this preference with exemplary energy and wit until the very end.

editorial@observer.com

In his guise as a political and historical essayist, he was a fearless critic of narrow orthodoxies and bullying cliques, from communist apologists to the Israel lobby, from "liberal hawks" to progressive educationists. And his political writings have proved not only perceptive but often prophetic.

And controversial. As The Times recounts:

His views on Israel made Mr. Judt an increasingly polarizing figure. He placed himself in the midst of a bitter debate when, in 2003, he outlined a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem in The New York Review of Books, proposing that Israel accept a future as a secular, bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs enjoyed equal status.

In 2006, a scheduled talk at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan was abruptly canceled for reasons later hotly disputed, but apparently under pressure, explicit or implicit, from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, told The New York Observer at the time that Mr. Judt, on Israel, “has become precisely the kind of intellectual whom his intellectual heroes would have despised.” Mr. Judt’s name had been removed from the masthead of the magazine, where he had been a contributing editor, after his article on the one-state solution.

Judt became ill two years ago but continued to work, describing the his experience of the disease in a series of essays for The New York Review of Books:

What is distinctive about ALS—the least common of this family of neuro-muscular illnesses—is firstly that there is no loss of sensation (a mixed blessing) and secondly that there is no pain. In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration.

Visit NPR and Tablet to read recent interviews with Judt. Judt's work for The New York Review of Books can be found here.

Today the younger Judt takes to the internet to respond. In a piece for the Daily Beast, he writes:

Mr. Wolff, I can't get around one blockade that will prevent me from proving that I wrote my half of the article: your habit of parading your own opinions as fact, caused by your willingness to make up anything in order to get a few reads, comments, and tweets.

The article is entitled "Michael Wolff is the Child." Which seems sort of fair!

Still, NB: contributor bio:

Daniel Judt was born in September, 1994, and is in the ninth grade at the Dalton School.

An Observation:In today's print edition there are three stories—out of six slots—about Iran. Auntie Mabel continues to refuse to acknowledge it. But she does spread the wealth today! We hit on a lot of categories, including two new ones—arts and education—but health once again dominates. In fact, for the first time since we started this last Monday, health stories are now more popular than columnists pieces for our Auntie. Maybe it has something to do with the rain. Or abs.

1. The "Older Investor" story climbs from No. 2 to No. 1! Not that we're surprised.

2. Abs. Still!

3. Salt + Sugar + Fat = Food makers own us. But Tara Parker-Pope says Aunt Mabel can fight it.

4. Our winning—and only—columnist today!

5. Arts reporter Roberta Smith travels to Venice to report back on "possibly the best unmanned art history lecture you’ll ever experience." It's also the first arts story we've had in seven days of Aunt Mabel!

6. This is about Jews in Peru.

7. BlackBerry etiquette!

8. High-thinker Tony Judt inserts himself in Israel and Palestine issues once again. This came out yesterday, and took a day to gain some steam.

9. First education story! We have a feeling this will heat up again in the late summer. But for now, we learn that special-ed kids can get government reimbursement for private-school tuition.

10. Our No. 1 story yesterday that combines investigative reportage with Auntie's favorite topic (health) just barely clings onto the top 10.

Final Tally:
Health: 3
Columnists: 1
Money: 1
Ethics: 1
Education: 1
Arts: 1
Op-Ed Contributor: 1
Foreign News: 1

Seven Day Total:
Health: 15
Columnists: 14
Travel: 5
Technology: 5
Money: 5
Op-Ed Contributors: 4
Ethics: 2

Netanyahu's policies are, from Judt's left-of-center point of view, awful. But he expressed optimism that political developments there would lead to a more constructive debate here.

Referring to the man expected to be Israel's next foreign minister, the ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman, he said, "A man like Lieberman, if he appeared in the government, particularly in a senior position in any other democratic country, he'd provoke a huge public debate. It may be that what it shows is that Netanyahu may be more than a little bit autistic—that is to say that he is so far away from the mainstream, I don't mean anti-Israeli or pro-Israeli, I just mean mainstream thought, not only on the Gaza problem, the Israel problem, the Palestine problem, but also on the sort of people you should have in your government—that it opens up a space in which to discuss Israel in ways that are not about Israel per se."

Judt, who has lived in Israel and volunteered as a driver and translator for the I.D.F. during the Six Day War, described a recent evolution of the political consensus in Israel as a "radical sort of series of steps, a shift to a sort of nationalist, mostly secular territorialist, resentfulist, excuse my language, fuck youist attitude towards the outside world." It is a sign, he said "that something has gone wrong in the Israeli political system."

Asked if the administration of Barack Obama, who in a press conference last night acknowledged that Netanyahu's government didn't make the realization of a two-state solution any easier, would apply more pressure on Israel, Judt said, "Yes, if they know how to do it."

Referring to Netanyahu's participation in the peace process, he said, "The only person who can force him into it is an American president who puts their feet to the fires and says, 'I'm talking to Iran, I don't care what you guys think, we're having a Palestinian state. We're closing down the settlements. If you open up a single new settlement or expand them, you can forget about your three billion a year.'"

But Judt said that supporters of more forceful American posture toward Israel on negotiating with its neighbors had received what he called "mixed messages."

The positive signs, according to Judt, were the appointment of George Mitchell over Dennis Ross as an envoy to the region, which he took to mean that the administration sees the Israeli-Palestinian issue as one that "doesn't have to be regarded as somehow unique and outside of history," but rather one that is "much more like Northern Ireland. No clear-cut wrong side or right side, but a situation that can't go on."

Judt was likewise enthusiastic about Obama's efforts to engage Iran in a constructive dialogue. "Because," he said, "in Israel, Iran is a sort of measuring stick. If you are absolutely pro-Israel you never compromise on Iran. But from Obama's point of view, Iran is absolutely vital to cover him in his overwhelming focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you were doing a sort of Kissingeresque view of international interests, you'd see that Washington and Iran have similar interests. And I think the Israelis see that and realize that the message of the opening up to Tehran is that America will look after its own real interests and not always follow Israel's view of the matter. Those are very much counter to the 'we can do anything because American will let us' view.

Judt said that the mixed message came when Obama failed to come to the defense of Charles Freeman, the Israel critic who was up for a key intelligence post.

"He let him hang. I think that was a mistake, not because of the guy, he can always be replaced, but because symbolically it said to the Israelis 'safe, no pressure.'"

Judt said that there had already been clear signs that the political debate about Israel was becoming more vigorous in the United States. He pointed to the editorial page of The New York Times, which he said was a barometer of mainstream thinking and had published several pieces by Roger Cohen arguing that it was quite all right to criticize Israel. He also said there was a more reasonable and mature discussion on various blogs about the proposal to boycott Israel.

"The level of conversation was much better than the old days, which are not so old, which was one side saying, 'Boycott Israel, it's a fascist state,' and the other side was saying, 'That's Auschwitz talk.'"

That discussion would open up further as Israel appointed officials and followed policies that many Jews in and out of Israel took issue with, he said.

"The other thing is that as Israel does stupider things domestically and therefore Jews do stupider things to Jews, other Jews feel liberated to say that was a stupid thing to do. When Jews do stupid things to Arabs or nasty things to Arabs there is much greater pressure on mainstream Jewish opinion to remain silent, which I disapprove of, but I understand it. Now, no one I know feels that they have to be silent about the fact that Israel has gone a step too far in even considering Lieberman as foreign minister."

He added, "A lot of people in this country beyond John Mearsheimer and other critics of the Israel lobby have started to say, 'How dysfunctional is it that we have to think twice before pointing out that our closest foreign ally may appoint as foreign minister someone who is going to do profound damage to our interests as well as Israel's?'"

And it was there, he said, that he saw an opening for greater debate.

"The lobby will fight back very hard because this is a sort of determining question: Are you allowed to criticize a part of Israeli politics without being thought to be anti-Israeli? If the lobby were smart, they would say it is O.K. to be angry about Lieberman and Netanyahu, but they are not particularly smart."

"The whole point of Zionism," Judt said, "was to make a normal country in which Jews were just like everyone else and had a world of politics just like everyone else and could therefore live real modern lives like everyone else. And if we can't talk about Israel as a normal country that does good things and bad things, screws up and is sometimes a lousy, dysfunctional ally, the same way Italy sometimes is, then Zionism has failed."

Abraham Foxman says yes.

"It's already changed," said Mr. Foxman, whose position as national director of the Anti-Defamation League makes him the media's go-to person for quotes on perceived anti-Israel bias. "The government hasn't even been formed and it's been called right-wing, extremist, fascist, hard-line. It's already out there."

So does Tony Judt.

"It might be possible to open a debate that says, ‘Look, this is not an anti-Israel discussion," said Mr. Judt, the director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, whose criticism of the pro-Israel lobby in America kicked off a public fight during which, at one point, he accused Mr. Foxman of sabotaging a scheduled speaking engagement at the Polish consulate and likened him to gutter trash.

"This is a discussion about what's happened in Israel such that there's a far-far-right government that no one could have imagined 10 years ago, and certainly not 40 years ago," he said. "So let's talk about what this means. We now have a government that doesn't even pay lip service to the peace process. It doesn't acknowledge Palestinians' right to a state and in the case of the foreign minister, if he is appointed, he's an out-and-out racist. That's something you can say about a country, I hope, without even appearing to criticize the country per se."

The fact that debate exists over Israel's policies isn't new. What may begin to change, with the advent of the second Benjamin Netanyahu era in Israel following the February election, is that the "out there" described by Mr. Foxman won't be limited to America's political margins-the Cynthia McKinneys and Jim Morans and Ron Pauls in Washington, or those Juan Coles and Stephen Walts and John Mearsheimers in the academic world, who constitute what amounts to a political niche as European-style critics of the Israeli enterprise and of what they believe to be a much-too-powerful Israel lobby in America.

(As of the evening of March 24, Israel's left-leaning Labor Party was set to join the still-forming coalition, which also includes the ultra-nationalist party of Avigdor Lieberman, whom Mr. Netanyahu has reportedly chosen to be foreign minister.)

Certainly, there are indications of a shifting posture at the very top levels of American government, beginning in Jerusalem on March 3, when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed Israel to open border crossings "to address the humanitarian needs in Gaza" and again called for the fulfillment of obligations to create a "viable Palestinian state." The next day, in Ramallah, she publicly criticized Israel's plan to demolish dozens of Palestinian homes as "unhelpful" to the peace process.

It was hardly vitriolic stuff-or anything remotely indicative of any organic hostility toward the Jewish state-but in diplomatic-speak, and Clinton-diplomatic-speak no less, it represented an unmistakable change not only from the unwavering Israel-boosting of the two Bush terms but from Mrs. Clinton's four-square-behind-Israel rhetoric as a senator from New York.

One seeming counterexample to the idea of a shift in the new administration was the implosion of the president's nomination of Charles Freeman, a critic of Israel, for a key intelligence post after prominent Israel supporters, including Senator Chuck Schumer, lobbied against him. But the resulting debate over Mr. Freeman's withdrawal, not only on lefty blogs but in what lefty bloggers derisively refer to as the M.S.M., was remarkable for its explicit assessment of the limits of acceptable discussion of Middle East politics in America.

Independent of the Freeman controversy, in the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof has criticized Israel on humanitarian grounds, and Roger Cohen, who referred to the man who will reportedly become Israel's new foreign minister as a "race-baiting anti-Arab firebrand," has in recent weeks written multiple pieces arguing that it's more than acceptable to be critical of Israel's government.

"Obama's new Middle Eastern diplomacy and engagement will involve reining in Israeli bellicosity and a probable cooling of U.S.-Israeli relations," he wrote on March 22. "It's about time. America's Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy has been disastrous, not least for Israel's long-term security."

Mainstream and liberal magazines and papers around the country have asked what the selection of Mr. Lieberman-a man who The New Republic's Marty Peretz, an Israel hawk, called "neo-fascist" and "the Israeli equivalent of Jörg Haider"-says about Israel's political compass.

"Critics will always be critical," said Aaron David Miller, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center who has advised several secretaries of state about the Middle East. "And that has always been at the margins. But the more appropriate question is whether or not the emergence of a right-wing government in these circumstances would somehow create a significant or consequential shift in public opinion that would create a different climate, not among Israel's traditional critics, but among Israel's friends, or would it make those friends less willing and/or able to defend the Israelis in the courts of public opinion in this country."

Among the people who might be considered the "traditional critics," these developments are an unalloyed good.

John Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago best known for co-authoring "The Israel Lobby"-a 2006 essay that is regarded by many Israel supporters as the consummate anti-Israel manifesto-said in an interview that while United States policy toward Israel was unlikely to change, the way people talked and thought about Israel would.

"Israel is going to come in for more criticism," he said. "And by the way, I believe that will be good for the United States and good for Israel. And it's not because I'm hostile to Israel. But because I think it's a normal country, and like all normal countries it sometimes pursues boneheaded policies. And it makes good sense to criticize it when it does."

That the incoming coalition government will facilitate criticism of Israel in America is an idea shared even by officeholders who find Mr. Mearsheimer's views on Israel repellent.

The hope of these supporters, in part, rests on the idea that the Israeli government would never actually go to the extremes espoused in the rhetoric of Mr. Lieberman, and that in practice Israel can't simply walk away from a two-state peace process, as Mr. Netanyahu effectively proposed to do during the campaign.

"If there is a right-wing government in Israel that is so right-wing that it's not moderate and flexible in terms of working with the United States, I wouldn't expect that regime to remain in power very long," said Representative Eliot Engel of New York, a staunch supporter of Israel. "I think either Netanyahu is going to want to moderate himself, or an element of the coalition would withdraw, collapsing the government."

(Mr. Engel said he'd be there for Israel nonetheless: "If we see that there are some problems on the other side, that it may embolden some critics of Israel, then supporters of Israel like me are going to be five times as vocal as we've been in the past and counter any of the anti-Israeli nonsense we hear from the critics of Israel in the United States.")

Representative Jerrold Nadler, also of New York, said he felt that the perception of Israel's veering to a hard-right government would "be harmful" and would amount to "ammunition" for Israel's critics. Mr. Nadler, a liberal Democrat who supported a two-state solution when that was still a controversially dovish position for a New York politician to take, said that there were indeed real points for Israel's public and politicians to debate, including whether a subversive messianic streak in the army could threaten its tradition of trying to avert civilian casualties, or whether a movement of nationalist Zionist settlers threatened to destabilize Israeli society.

But, articulating a view common among Jews of his generation and older, he said that the rightful place for that debate was well within Israel's borders. A lusty fight over Israel's policies in America, he said, would surely be exploited by Israel's enemies.

"They are going to have a real conflict over it, but here, because of the uncompromising anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic attitude of the critics, you are probably going to see a rallying on the other side, because you can't deal with it honestly," he said.

"In the American Jewish community, there is an old question: When you disagree with the Israeli government, should you say something? It's going to be harder to do so because that criticism is going to be used as fodder in a war to destroy Israel. I've criticized Israel policy, but I'm becoming more reluctant."

He added, "I don't see much rational discussion, unfortunately."

Nearly five years after prominent liberal hawks supported the war in Iraq, the city’s community of progressive thinkers has still not reached a consensus on perhaps the biggest global issue of the day—how the West should address political Islam. There is sharp disagreement over what Western intellectuals addressing Islam should be saying, how they should be saying it, and even whom they should be saying it to.

The debate, between some of New York’s most esteemed liberal thinkers—Paul Berman and Tony Judt of New York University, Mark Lilla of Columbia and Ian Buruma of Bard College—has captured the imagination of Europe, where the culture clash between Muslim immigrants and Western secularists is more urgently and immediately felt. But now, with the drumbeat steadily building among American conservatives for open conflict with Iran, the fight is coming back home and the city’s most venerated pages are the battleground.

“It’s going to be a big fault line,” said Mr. Berman, “The question is: What is the Muslim world?” To be more specific: Is it a place to which Western values should be exported (at the barrel of a gun if necessary), or must it find its own path to modernity? And what is the real liberal position: standing up for values, or being tolerant and pragmatic?

The same basic fault line last emerged in 2002 and 2003 over whether to go to war in Iraq. Now, it centers around whether Western liberals should lend their support to an influential Swiss-born Egyptian scholar and devout Muslim named Tariq Ramadan. Mr. Lilla, Mr. Buruma, Mr. Judt and their allies argue that Mr. Ramadan exerts a modernizing and moderating force on political Islam, while Mr. Berman, along with other liberal Iraq war supporters like Christopher Hitchens, accuse him of being a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and highlight his debt to the thinking of his grandfather Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood, a group eventually banned by the Egyptian government for periodic violence.

In February, Mr. Buruma penned a feature-length profile of Mr. Ramadan for The New York Times Magazine that presented the scholar as a cagey but promising asset for the liberal cause in the Islamic world. That piece prompted a 28,000-word riposte from Mr. Berman in The New Republic months later. Mr. Berman argued that underneath his moderate rhetoric, Mr. Ramadan is in fact a dangerous radical, and attacked Mr. Buruma and The Times Magazine for taking him at face value.

Then, in August, The Times Magazine shot back at Mr. Berman—though not by name—with a piece adapted from Mr. Lilla’s new book The Stillborn God, which argues against the notion that we should encourage a Western-style separation of church and state in the Muslim world. Mr. Lilla asserted the need for dialogue with Mr. Ramadan, and condemned the “harsh criticism” with which some “western intellectuals” had treated him.

As for Mr. Buruma, he did not at first respond in print to Mr. Berman’s New Republic salvo (nor did he get through the whole thing at first: “I sort of read it in dribs and drabs,” he told The Observer). But last month, he published an article on Norman Podhoretz’s latest book, World War IV, in The New York Review of Books, in which he acknowledged that Mr. Ramadan is a “slippery figure,” but reaffirmed his position that any attempt to make Muslim fundamentalism compatible with liberal democracy “is reason enough for me to take him seriously.”

Now it’s Mr. Berman’s time to respond: To that end, he has sent a 1,000-word letter to The New York Review, which will run with a response from Mr. Buruma in the back of the November 8th issue. But Mr. Berman is going further still: in March, Melville House Press will publish his book The Flight of the Intellectuals, about the ongoing debate. About a third of the book will consist of an expanded version of his TNR piece.

Mr. Berman believes that, in the wake of the Iraq war, his liberal opponents have lost confidence in the West’s ability to fight Islamic extremism, and sacrificed their principles for expediency. “Lilla is literally arguing for lack of principle, Buruma is demonstrating on the page that he hasn’t read the guy. Insofar as Judt is part of this, Judt is merely an insult-monger,” he told The Observer. “One wants to be on the winning side,” he said.

The problem, he said, is that political Islam is not a centuries-old religious movement but a recent creation, heavily influenced by European fascism, and thus, like European fascism, can be defeated by American perseverance and strength. On the question of exactly how to do that, Mr. Berman is less clear—he says it’s up to the diplomats, not the intellectuals.

But his values-infused rhetoric has opened him up to attacks from the left flank that he is an unwitting enabler of President Bush and the neoconservatives. And in an interview, Mr. Buruma took issue with the personal tone of Mr. Berman’s attack on Mr. Buruma’s Times Magazine piece.

“It was full of innuendo and insinuation, feelings that he imagined were there which weren’t,” Mr. Buruma said. “He gets very emotional. He gets very excited … a lot of spittle around the mouth and so on. You don’t really need that.

“Nowhere did he come up with any real evidence to show that Ramadan was advocating violence against liberal democracy,” Mr. Buruma continued.

Mr. Buruma added that much of Mr. Berman’s piece—namely, his rigorously academic analysis of Mr. Ramadan’s intellectual roots—was detached from reality. “Berman is a very bookish man who seems to think that social and political issues are all driven by ideas, and that if you read all the text somehow you can come to an understanding of what’s really driving things,” Mr. Buruma said. “In fact what is much more important to look at is, you know, employment policies, economic issues, education policies, demographics.”

Mr. Buruma said Mr. Berman is wrong to turn Mr. Ramadan into a litmus test dividing faithful liberals from fallen ones. “I think Berman probably takes him more seriously than I do,” he said. “I don’t think Ramadan is a very profound thinker, and I don’t think he’s politically enormously important. … If anything, it’s part of the intellectual celebrity industry that there is such an interest in him.”

Mr. Buruma emphasized that he was not compromising any of his liberal values in supporting Mr. Ramadan, but being pragmatic in his approach to the modernization of Islam. “It’s not that I agree more with Tariq Ramadan than I agree with Paul Berman,” Mr. Buruma said. “I believe in democracy and liberalism and all those good things, but we’re faced with a situation where we have a large minority, and we have to find some way of integrating those people as citizens of liberal democracy without coming to violent clashes or provoking them to violence.”

Mr. Lilla and Mr. Judt both agreed, saying that incremental concessions made to a political Islam that denied human rights did not always amount to an abdication of principle.

“The first liberal virtue is a sense of reality,” Mr. Lilla said.

Mr. Judt, meanwhile, in an Oct. 7 Times Op-Ed piece bemoaned the unabashed resurgence of “liberal hawks,” a flock to which he says Mr. Berman belongs. In an interview, he said that tolerance was a more intrinsic attribute of liberalism than a messianic advocacy of universal values.

“The true Western value is the ability to understand difference and to accommodate and to know where the limits are,” Mr. Judt said. “Berman is saying the limits are rigid and we will make no accommodation. That’s very un-Western, really, it’s very illiberal.”

Mr. Berman bristles at the suggestion that his beliefs have turned him into a neoconservative. “A lot of these guys are … afraid of allowing themselves to appear as though they resemble neocons,” he said. “These people have lost the sense of confidence that should allow them to maintain their own position regardless of what kind of blather the president happens to be saying at any given moment.” Mr. Berman admits that, post-Iraq, those arguing for unapologetic confrontation with the Islamic world are at a disadvantage: “I think at the moment, in this country, my side looks beleaguered, and the other side looks like it has the big institutions,” he said. “But I think it’s going to go the other way. We’re right and they’re wrong.”

Let's declare what's afoot right now: it's a movement. Progressive Jews all over are denouncing the mainstream leadership's staunch support of the hateful occupation, and some of them are linking it to the U.S.'s bloody occupation of Iraq. In England, Independent Jewish Voices, a group of anti-occupation Jews (including Harold Pinter and Eric Hobsbawm) is breaking away from the mainstream organizations to show how bankrupt their lobbying position is. In Australia, Antony Loewenstein sees "dissent growing." His book My Israel Question, which I gather is even more off-the-hook than stuff I write, is to be published in the States this spring. And speaking of the States, Jewish Voice for Peace, an Oakland-based group with chapters nationwide, has lately launched a fabulous website, Muzzlewatch, dedicated to fighting the smears and threats that the lobby has always used against Jews who want to treat Palestinian Arabs with dignity. Meantime, the Union of Progressive Zionists, which brought Breaking the Silence to the U.S. last fall to describe real conditions in the West Bank to young Jews, is fighting to keep its membership on the Israel on Campus Coalition, and winning—a battle with the ZOA whose onset I reported on this blog two months back. Some Hillel groups have welcomed Breaking the Silence.

The one comment I'd add is that I give credit to progressive gentiles for helping to break open this discussion. Yes, Meretz-USA has been tireless. Norman Finkelstein has given hundreds of speeches. But Mearsheimer, Walt, and Jimmy Carter released this movement last year by embarrassing Jews with statements about the immorality of the treatment of Palestinians that were mainstreamed. They gave license to the media to write about this stuff, and have spurred progressive Jews to play their part and recover progressive voices going back to Hannah Arendt and Elmer Berger. 60 years before Walt and Mearsheimer, Rabbi Berger warned in The Jewish Dilemma about the Zionist "machine" and the ways it would transform Jewish identity and politics in the name of nationalism.

Hark! I hear the sound of the tumbrils, rumbling through the streets of northwest Washington, collecting neoconservatives.

"It is a lie, and implicitly defamatory (a dissolver of Israel is an anti-Zionist is an anti-semite, etc...). From Dershowitz one expects no better. But thanks to Leon [Wieseltier] it is the received reading of my text. What I actually said was that Israel cannot remain an exclusively Jewish state while aspiring to be a democracy and must, if it is to survive, become the state of all its citizens."

"Tony Judt is in favor of the complete dissolution of the state of Israel... the total dissolution of the state of Israel," said Dershowitz.

Two comments. First, that Dershowitz should bring this up shows that those who favor a single state in Palestine have gotten the issue on the agenda. Dershowitz's line is is now the talking point. Leon Wieseltier made a similar statement about Judt, with a similarly-angry tone, in the New Republic a few weeks back.

Second, Dershowitz's characterization doesn't seem fair to me; he is using eliminationist rhetoric to suggest that Judt is a kind of Nazi or antisemite, who would sweep Jews into the sea. In fact, if you read Judt's groundbreaking essay, you understand that his position is being caricatured. Yes, Dershowitz is right; Judt's vision would result in the end of the Jewish state. But his tone is pained, realistic, and even idealistic: it is a recovery of the old Judah Magnes/Elmer Berger/Anglo-American Inquiry Commission position that partition is racialist, that Arab and Jew should learn to live together in historic Palestine—because god knows, they haven't done a very good job of living with partition.

For another point of view on this, read Elik Alhanan's two-state position (near the end of this long post). Meantime, below is an excerpt of Judt's piece: